Visual Studio is not usually installed in Production Environments. It is reasonable to assume that Visual Studio is not installed at your customer’s site. Field technicians, engineers, QA and developers who are sent to solve problems at a customer’s site often experience difficulties in debugging and analyzing an application in Production Environments. However, even the most “sterile” environments contain built in OS tools that, with proper use, can enable you to receive sufficient information to track down the reason for a program crash. Tools that don’t require installation can help you find the exact source file, line number, stack trace and local variables at the time of the call that caused the crash. In this workshop we will explore and demo the Debugging Tools for Windows package, the SOS extension, and some other useful tools used for native and managed applications and show how to collect and analyze data in production environments.

Gad J. Meir has worked in the computer industry for many years; his second computer language was assembly of PDP 8. His main specialty today is using MSF (Microsoft Solution Framework) principles to identify faults in development or deployment processes/procedures. Gad’s main task is to pre-empt problems in the project-planning phase. Unfortunately, he is usually summoned at the last minute, either when the project is about to die or worse still, for the post mortem. Dealing with corpses is directly connected with his second specialty, which is analyzing dumps, blue screens and other low-level plumbing tasks. Gad’s favorite role is accompanying projects as a technical mentor. In this position, he is exposed to a wide variety of challenging problems, where he uses his extensive hands-on experience to find creative practical solutions. Gad is currently the R&D Manager at IDAG Ltd. (http://www.idag.co.il) and his blogs can be found at http://weblogs.asp.net/gadim/ and http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/gadim